


Gravvesite

by RyMagnatar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Death, Future Fic, M/M, Post Game, a bit of pesterlog at the end, and assassinations, and dying people, and holes in the ground, and stuff that people die in, dying, graves too, mentions of dead people, reincarnated post game, waaaaaaay in the future fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 11:17:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/584828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyMagnatar/pseuds/RyMagnatar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your moirail has died and you were not there for him.<br/>He has been buried and you did not even pay respects to his body before hand. You had no time to.<br/>So you go to his gravesite and you pay your last respects, but there's someone there you don't expect. In fact he's the last one you expect to be there. </p><p>You are Karkat Vantas, and somehow, you keep out-living all your friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravvesite

The very first thing you notice about the place is the air.

Stepping off the ship right at the dock you can tell the air is different. That in itself isn’t much of a surprise to you. Every planet, every dock, hell every damn ship has its own air. The air in your own craft is slightly sweet, from the flowers that have been modified to filter the air at an accelerated rate. They’re a crafted gift from a friend so long ago you barely remember her face, her voice or the touch of her hand on your arm. You remember her eyes, though, when you look at the stunning green of the miniature bionic garden in your personal shuttle.

This time the air is planet-side air. This is the air of Earth.

You look up at the blue, blue sky around the midday sun and for the first time that sky color doesn’t sour your mood. For him it’s the laughter you remember, obnoxious, noisome but infectious. The times you laughed the hardest, making your ribs ache and tears well up in your eyes was with him. With a wistful, tired smile, you look away from the sky and hunch your jacket closer up around your neck to block out the wind. This area of the earth is desert, with a sweeping landscape of red rock and sagebrush. You like to keep your ship with a high percentage of humidity and warmth now that you’re so much older, so the desert winds that whip at you make you feel like they’re stripping the moisture out of you.

Shoulders hunched against the wind, you walk the quarter mile from where you docked your ship to the small solitary building that serves as a check in for this little town. You look at the slanted roof and the paint peeling walls and you make a bet with yourself that there’s no one inside.

Stepping into the building, you are not really all that surprised when you see you’re right. The room has a front desk, a couple of waiting chairs and one of those cacti in a pot in the corner. You walk up to the desk where there’s a sign that reads; _Please Sign In With Your Name, Ship Identification, And The Star Date. Thank You!_ You take a little longer staring at the typing style than you probably should before you hunch over and scribble your name: _Vantas_ and your ship’s identification: _The Red Twin 001169_. After a pause, you add the date: _05.23.3015_

Pausing, you lick your lips and tap the pen against the page. You look up the list and see the information of the last captain to sign in. _Turoak. Imperial Hearse 347.2. 04.13.3015._

For several minutes, it’s difficult to swallow. You close your eyes, controlling the urge to shout in anger. There’s no one else there but you, anyway, and if someone came because of your yelling, you didn’t want to have to deal with them.

So instead you jam the pen back into the cup and turn around, stalking out of the building through the door opposite the one you entered. Through this door is the way to the town itself. Or at least, what counts as a town in this place. You walk down the sidewalk, hands jammed into your pockets against the wind and your chin down. The place you’re headed isn’t that far out, if you remember correctly, just around the bend and up a hill.

When you reach the bottom of the hill, you look up and curse yourself. Hill? _Hill_? Who the fuck calls this a hill? You can barely see the house at the top, a white and black smear amongst the greenery up there. Grinding your teeth together, you settle in for the long hike up there.

The sun is about to set when you finally reach the stone pathway up to the front of the house. You stop at the edge and run a hand through your hair, mindful of your nubby horns. From up here, you can clearly see the small town at the bottom of the hill, and even your ship, glossy black with a bright red underbelly, waiting for you below. The horizon is a glittering line of orange, red and pink clouds that you find beautiful, even if you have to ignore the way the red pours across the atmosphere like your blood would spread in a pool of water.

Turning back around, you look over the glass door and the white washed walls of the building and decide to fuck it. You walk around the house, ignoring its existence. You’re really here for what’s behind the house after all.

There’s another little path, this made of white round stones laid carefully in the long green grass, moving out towards the true top of the hill. There’s a tree there, with branches reaching far out wide and a twisted, gnarled trunk. Below the tree is a graveyard. And this is why you’re here.

The graveyard is surrounded by a low wrought iron fence and the gate is noiseless as you push it open and step out. Just inside, you steel yourself against what you’re going to find and swallow with some difficulty. Then you walk past the graves, reading them as you go.

At a few, you stop and reach out, running your fingers over the smooth, polished stone.  You can see your own face in the surface, reflected back at you as if to remind you of your life and your mutation. Tracing your fingers over the names of your friends, you ignore the way your own red eyes stare back at you.

Finally you come to the end of the row, where a fresh grave has been dug. The feelings of hatred, of inadequacy, of guilt and shame, come pressing down on you all at once. You were away, doing your job, working for the empire, and he had died without you there.

You got the messages as soon as you came back online to the subnet, came back within range, and they poured over you like a waterfall, flooding your screens with his inquires, his cries, and then at last the announcement.  He had died. Your moirail had died. And you had failed to come to his side when he needed you most.

Kneeling down beside the fresh dirt, you put your hands on the smooth stone, tracing over his name, his symbol, and the words written on his headstone. “You should hate me,” you choke out the words around your tears, “you should hate me with all that you are, for leaving you with others to die like that. For not coming when you needed me most. You should rise from your grave just to chase me off because of the shithead I am in not getting to you soon enough.”

Your tears are cool streams of watery bright red down your face, dropping from your chin to soak into the dirt of his grave. “You should hate me, Gamzee, because I am the most loathsome, disgusting, abominable creature in the world. I lived when you died, when all of you died. I lived…”

Words, for once, fail you. You lean against his stone and sob in the otherwise silence of the grave.

They make it difficult for you to breathe; choking your breath away and making you shudder. Your heart breaks for him here like you couldn’t allow while on your ship, racing to his last location- only to get there too late. You mourn him harder than you have mourned any other friend you’ve lost. He was your moirail for sweeps, for decades of sweeps. He was there during the game. He was there when you were able to reset the world. He found you again after that; took you in as his moirail and forgave your abhorrent blood.

When you had a fever for a week, the one that nearly killed you- that marked the change from your body being hot as a fire to cool like the depths of the ocean- he had held you, fed you by hand and rocked you as a grub. When you were accepted into the military- when you got awards and promotions- he was always there, always supporting you. He had been there for everything you needed him for.

Then-

Then when he needed _you_ -

When he needed you most, upon his deathbed-

You had not heard his call.

As you weep, appropriately, it begins to rain.

After you are soaked to the bone, hair stuck to your skull and your uniform molded to your body, you look up. To your surprise, there is one single cloud, far overhead the gravesite. Brushing the water from your face, you peer up with strained eyes and identify the cloud as one of those engineered ones with that slightly green tint to it. Designed to perform like a more natural form of watering a specific area, these clouds formed about the same time every day or however they were programed, and would rain water down.

 _Miracles,_ Gamzee had said when he first saw one, _motherfucking cloud miracles._ You hadn’t expected anything different from him.

The sound of rain on an umbrella catches your attention and you turn to see someone walking towards you in the down pour. You don’t recognize him until he’s on the other side of Gamzee’s grave and you catch the flash of gold on his finger.

 “Kar.”

You look up into the violet eyes of Eridan, the very last person you thought would be here, and gape.

“Kar, c’mon, get outta the rain for a bit an’ dry off. You can come back out here later when it’s done its job.” He offers his hand. The rings you thought you saw are just one ring. A thick gold band with a dark gemstone rests on his left ring finger. It was a tradition of humans that some trolls picked up. That is, they picked it up from the human they were in a relationship with.

You take his hand and let him pull you up. He’s still stronger than you, even though his hand is warmer than your own. _Just because of the rain freezing me,_ you tell yourself the lie and don’t believe it.

He leads you out of the graveyard and to the backdoor of the house, following the white stone pathway there. At the back door he folds up the umbrella, shakes it out a little and then sets is beside the door. He ushers you inside and you stand, shivering, on tile while he says something about getting you a towel.

When he comes back, he drapes the towel around you, rubbing your hair dry through it and tending to you like you were a grub separated from his lusus. You open your mouth to snap at him but then get a clear look of his face. He’s smiling, ever so slightly, a sad, tired thing that looks half dead from misuse and out of place with the wrinkles on his forehead and the silver in his hair above his fins. Old. He looks old. Older than you even. You try to remember when he was reborn in this world and you can’t.

In fact, you try to remember anything about him from this timeline and you fail to. Reaching out your hand, you hesitantly touch his cheek.

He stops trying to dry you with the towel and blinks at you. His purple eyes are wide behind his glasses, wide with surprise and then they darken as his lashes lower. He pulls your hand down and says, “Let’s get you into something dry. Do you have clothing in your sylladex?”

“Just uniforms,” you say through chattering teeth. He nods and rifles through his own sylladex quickly.

He pulls out some clothing and hands them to you, “Dry off a bit before you get into these. I’ll go fix up something to eat.” And then he’s gone.

You strip down, hang up your clothing as best you can on the pegs inside the door and dry off. The clothing you pull on is too long in the leg and not quite wide enough in the shoulder but you don’t care. It’s warm and comfortable otherwise. Entering the house, you find yourself right in the kitchen. He’s heating something up on the stove, stirring in some chopped up vegetables with a wooden spoon.

You hesitate. Should you sit at the table? Should you offer to help him?

The microwave beeps loudly and makes you jump. He pulls out a mug and stirs some honey into it. Bringing it over to you he puts it into your hands, “Don’t drink this yet. It’ll scald your mouth somethin’ awful. Just go sit with it in your hands.”

You make a motion towards the table and he waves his hand at you, “No. Out there where it’s actually fuckin’ comfortable. Go sit on the couch Kar.”

Numbly, you nod and leave the kitchen. There is a living room beyond. A small fireplace is there, but it has nothing but smoldering embers and a lick or two of flame on occasion. You curl up in the large chair by the fire and stare down at the- oh. It’s milk that he heated up for you.

By the time the milk has cooled to an edible level, you’re feeling quite warm now and he comes out of the kitchen with two bowls of soup. He places one on the coffee table in front of you and sits on the couch to eat his own. He’s silent as he eats. Steadily spooning out bite after bite without a word, you feel your curious thoughts swirling to the surface.

Squashing those for now, you put down the empty mug and pick up the soup. It’s already cooling with a couple of melting ice cubes inside. Slowly, you begin to eat as well. The chunks of meat and vegetables make you feel better, but it’s the broth that clears up your gummed nose and throat from your crying.

When you finish, Eridan stands and takes your bowl again. “Want anythin’ else to eat or drink?”

You shake your head.

“How about warmth? Are you warm enough?”

“I suppose.”

“Kar, that’s not an answer.” He arches an eyebrow at you, “Do you want a blanket or somethin’? I could kick up the fire if that’s what you want.”

Something inside of you snaps, “I _want_ to be left alone! Can’t you just let me be miserable for one goddamn second? I lost my moirail and I want to grieve for him!”

He stares at you, his expression blank. Then he turns his back on you and walks out of the room.

Now you do feel miserable. You curl in on yourself, holding your face in your hands. He was only trying to _help!_ He wasn’t pressing you to talk or getting too close to you. All he was doing was keeping you from getting sick, making a safe place for you to mourn and yet you had to be an ungrateful little asshole and-

“Kar, here.”

Jerking your head up, you blink back the tears forming in your eyes again and look to see him holding up a blanket. He wraps it around you, bundling you up until only your head sticks out, and then he smiles slightly. It still looks tired, but at least this time it touches his eyes. “Feel better?”

“Yes- I-” the words are gummed up in your throat. You look down, ashamed of your anger, “Thank you.”

He pats your covered arm and says, “You’re welcome. You can sleep down here if you need to, but there’s a guest room up the stairs and to your left with a bed or a ‘coon in it.” He pulls his hand back.

“Are you going to sleep?” you ask, looking up at him.

“Yeah. I’ll be in the room across from the guest one, if you need anythin’.” He pulls away, “Goodnight.”

“G’night,” you mumble in reply. Settling back against the chair, you shuffle deeper into the blanket. As you do, you notice the crackling of the fire. It has several new logs on it now, adding warmth to the room. You smile a little and begin to doze.

* * *

Screaming, you wake up to trapped limbs and tangled legs and a chilled face. Blinded in the semi-darkness for a time, you continue to scream and flail until you push yourself violently off of the soft thing you were sleeping on. With a loud thump, you land heavily onto the ground, the wind knocked out of you and your shoulder and hip hurting from where you landed.

You lay your forehead against the rug below you and let out dry, painful sobs.

When the fire roars into life, you ignore it in favor of continuing to try and choke on your tears. Then hands lift you up from the floor, untangling the blanket from you. Bleary eyed, you look up into Eridan’s worried face. His hair is all out of place, the purple lock swept down across his forehead and the rest sticking up at odd intervals. There are deep shadows under his eyes, like waking up in the middle of the night is nothing to him.

He lifts you off the floor and cradles you against his chest as he pulls the blanket from your legs. You shiver at the warmth of his touch but burrow into his embrace. Your mind is settling as he climbs into that large chair and sits with you in his lap. You press your forehead against his shoulder and reach out to grab his shirt. Yet all you come in contact with is smooth, warm skin.

Lifting your head, you look down and realize he only wears a pair of pajama pants. He really was sleeping then, wasn’t he?

Eridan pulls the blanket back around you again, and your fingers take hold of that cloth. You let a sigh rumble up out of your throat and lean forward against him again. His hands rub soothing circles onto your back and soon you’re chirring very faintly.

“Better?” his voice is a puff of air against your ear.

“Mhm,” you nod slightly, but then stop when you feel your horn bumping his jaw. Quickly you clear your throat, “Yes. Thanks.”

“A course.” He says simply. “Nightmare?”

You grip the blanket tighter. The words jumble inside of you. They’re a dystopian swarm of tangled images and feelings, but you push through them and whisper, “Yes.”

His arms tighten around you and you feel the pressure of his cheek against your temple, “Try an’ sleep again, Kar. Don’t worry about anythin’ cause I got you safe.”

You know the words are supposed to comfort you, but tears burn in your eyes. You suck in a shuddering breath and say to his shoulder, “I dreamt… I dreamt he clawed out of the ground and tried to-” they stop again as your mind fights to remember and at the same time forget your dream.

_Gamzee’s large hands pushed back the dirt. His flesh dropped from his bones with rot. He stared at you with glistening indigo eyes. His decaying mouth plunged open. The words that he spat bring blood and bile up. They pour into your soul with accusation and burning hatred._

Rough fingertips run through your hair. Rounded claws scratch lightly at your scalp. They run a circle around the base of your horn and bring you twitching violently out of your dream remembering. You manage to sound indignant and push yourself back to snarl at Eridan wordlessly.

When he smiles at you, you hate him at the same time you hate yourself for being angry. His fingers run through your hair again and he murmurs, “The sopor would help you with these dreams, if you want to sleep in it.”

With a heavy tongue and heavy heart you shake your head and look down, “No. No I need them.”

He snorts. “Kar, that kind a self-punishment isn’t worth it. Believe me. Go sleep in the slime and make your peace in the mornin’.”

“I can’t make my peace!” you shout, “I can’t go and make peace to a grave, to a pile of dirt and a stupid rock with his name on it! The one I failed is buried and dead, Eridan! He died alone, curled up on his deathbed without a moirail, without a matesprit, alone and calling out for me but I was too much of an asshole to keep my comms open while I worked. I was too busy trying to not think about him, to focus on my work. I made him weaker by being his moirail and not coming when he needed me. Does he hate me for abandoning him? Was his last words my name, asking the darkness where I was? Did he cry for me? Did he try to get out of his bed on limbs too weak to carry his weight and try to find me himself?

“I’ll never know the answers to this because he is dead. He is dead and gone and buried.” You hiccup around your tears of anger, “He is dead and the dreambubbles have all been destroyed in the game and I will never see him again. I will never be able to apologize.”

“Shh,” Eridan whispers against your skin, your hair, as he gathers you close again. “I saw him when he was bein’ put underground, Kar. He looked as peaceful as he has ever looked in his fuckin’ life. I been talkin’ to him a while, talkin’ about life and death and what he was plannin’ when he died.”

“You lie,” the words you say are half-hearted at best.

“With my help he was able to put everythin’ in his will that he wanted to be done with his body. They painted up his face perfectly and laid him to rest here with all his friends, all a us who fought the game together.” He doesn’t even seem to hear your accusation. “He wanted to go underground quick, so they didn’t have to put any chemicals in his body to preserve it. Let me sink into the motherfuckin’ ground, he told me, let me sink and become part a the Earth that bore me.”

The words make you stop, lift your head and stare at him. That sounded suspiciously like Gamzee.

Eridan is looking past you, at the fire, as he says, “When I say make your peace, I don’t mean make it with him. He loved you Kar, you know that he did better than you know anythin’ else I bet. I want you to make peace with yourself. Over him, over all of them out there. Grieve for all your friends out there.”

You want to shy away when he turns his gaze on you because it glows from within like a fire. “Make peace with yourself, Kar, because I have a feelin’ that soon only you and Fef will be left of us who went through the game together. You’ll have to find others to love and who will love you. You will have to move on, if you want to live.”

You open your mouth to speak and then close it again, not knowing what you can say to that. After some silence, you finally manage to say, “You still have sweeps, Eridan. I know you do.”

He smiles at you and nods his head, “Yeah. I suppose I’ll be around a bit longer, but I’m only survivin’ now. All this,” he gestures to the room around the two of you, “All that I do here, this ain’t livin’. I haven’t been livin’ for a long, long time…” His left hand drops down again and you catch a flicker of reflection when he uses his thumb to turn the ring on his finger.

You don’t know what to say to that, so you lean forward against his chest and let him gather his arms around you again.

“You can stay here as long as you need, Kar,” Eridan whispers as you close your eyes. “As long as you need to make peace.”

“Mhm,” You sink into sleep

* * *

Morning comes with the smell of bacon in the air and too bright sunlight pouring out from the kitchen. With the blanket wrapped around your shoulders, you stumble in. You rub the grit from your eyes and grumble under your breath. Eridan’s whistling off key and has his back to you.

Despite last night’s protests, you take a seat at the table and stretch your arms out on top of it. “Bacon?”

“Good morning to you too,” Eridan replies. He brings over a plate to you that has, glories upon glories, pancakes on it. You dig into them without a second thought and nearly weep tears of joy when he puts those crisp little greasy strips of bacon on the plate next. They’re too hot by half but you endure the burn for the goodness. This morning’s drink is apple juice and it’s when  you’ve drunk half way through the glass that you nearly start choking.

Eridan thumps you on the back a couple of times and helps you recover your breath. “Kar, you’re too damn old to be forgettin’ to chew your food.”

“Apple juice.” You don’t know what else you can say.

He blinks in surprise and then laughs. His cheeks flush only slightly, but his fins turn a deep violet purple. He scratches the back of his head nervously, “Sorry, sorry. It’s habit for me, even though I personally prefer tea over apple juice. It’s just how I start my day.”

Eridan picks up the bottle in both his hands. The paper is half peeled away, but the big red apple on the front is still obvious. He won’t meet your gaze and the longer you stare in silence the deeper his blush became. In the silence he goes and puts the bottle away in the fridge. Then he makes his way back over to the stove and turns the bacon.

The ruby on his ring glints in the sunlight streaming in through the window. It catches your eye and you start talking before you can stop yourself. “It’s been two hundred fucking sweeps and you still wear that? What part of making peace does that fit into, Eridan?”

“I made my choices and I live with them,” He replies, not looking at you. That blush you caused before is gone now. His fins are nearly translucent grey skin and they don’t droop, even with Strider as the subject. “I loved him Kar. Loved him more than loved anyone before or since. An’ before you say a thin’, yeah I did love other people after him. He wasn’t my only matesprit-husband-thing in my life. I’ve lived a long fuckin’ time. But he was the one that…”

Eridan stops himself with a shake of his head. “Look, what I told you about dealin’ with your feelin’s, all I’m sayin’ is that it’s different when you lose your moirail. Especially when you aren’t there to say goodbye to them.” He forks the last of the bacon onto a plate and brings it over to you.

He briefly meets your gaze, giving you a smile that makes him look older than the grey hairs do. “I’ll leave you alone for a bit, but if you need me I’ll be in my study.” He takes his glass of apple juice and leaves you alone in the kitchen.

You twist around in your chair. The pancake you’ve got settling in your gut already is turning to lead. “Eridan, wait.”

He stops in the doorway. The gold on his finger glints along with the amber juice in his glass. “Yes?” Eridan glances over his shoulder. The smile is gone and his eyes are dark with emotion.

“Thanks. For breakfast. For last night. For everything.”

“A course,” Eridan says, “It’s a pleasure.”

“Have you… how long have you been doing this?” The last time you came here was for Terezi. That had been sweeps ago and you barely remember the night she was buried.

“Vriska.” He shook his head again. “Vriska went down in that battle, remember? I was out there with her. I was on the shuttle that brought her here and after that I stayed.”

“Why did you stay? What’s here for you?”

“All the people I loved and hated the most,” he replies. “And I really gotta go, Kar.”

“Eridan, wait!” you repeat yourself as he takes a step.

“Dammit Kar,” He whirls around. “What is it?” his eyes were filled with tears.

You feel tears in your own. “Please,” you can barely speak, “Don’t leave me alone.”

The silence echoes like a final heartbeat. He blinks a few times and his tears recede. He steps back over to you and, to your utter annoyance, ruffles your head like you’re a wriggler. “Finish your breakfast.”

He puts his glass back on the table and goes back to the counter. He starts washing the dishes, slowly, humming off key again, while you eat. You watch him all the while. You look at the sunlight coming in through the window, reflecting off the rings on the window sill and dashing gold and blue and red and the rainbow opal across the wall. His hair, his horns, his shoulders are all lined in the light, a halo of warmth, of tangible serenity.

When you finish eating you slide out of your chair and bring the dish over to him. He’s been washing with his eyes closed to the light. His black lashes are against his cheeks and even though he’s still got the grey hair above his earfin, the wrinkles around his mouth look more like laugh lines and he’s got no stressed furrow between his eyebrows. The dishware clinks together as you put it into the sink full of water.

He blinks his eyes open, looking at you with dazzling violet lit up with the sun’s rays, and he smiles.

You lean in and you kiss him.

* * *

CA: kar

If you sort of half squint one eye, it looks like space is moving a little bit faster around you. Cognitively you know it isn’t true. Nothing can go faster than you are going right at this moment without being violently and disastrously destroyed. Jade proved that. And since she was found splattered across a half mile with half of her skull through solid concrete of a wall with no fractures in either piece to be found, no one questioned it anymore. It was the Harley Certainty principle and you didn’t fuck with it.

CA: i can feel it

The very idea of stopping to refuel makes you want to scream. You simply bust out your reserve fuel tank, replace the one being used, and keep going. You pace, unable to stay still, unable to relax, so you pace back and forth in your ship’s brig. You’re going to be bitching at yourself that you’re going to have to refuel both tanks, but right now past you gives negative fucks in regards to future you. You cannot stop. You may not stop. You must not stop.

CA: its time

You come slicing out of light speed in the right solar system. There’s the once little blue planet that’s got a lot more brown and white than blue these past few sweeps. Your navigation system trills as it locks into its destination. The dial begins to go slower and you nearly break it twisting it back around. “No you fucking piece of shit, we will go no slower than this!” You lock in the command. 

CA: please

Reentry is a bitch. You come in too hot, too fast, at the wrong angle. You have to slide through far more atmosphere than you should just to slow down. You grip the arms of your chair and squeeze your eyes shut, praying to the god you didn’t believe in just so you could make it there in time. Your ship jostles and shakes so you have to open your eyes, you have to steer with careful taps, with double checks on position. You nearly clip an atmospheric flying device and snarl out a curse when it makes you dive down before you’re ready.

CA: hurry

You avoid the landing strip entirely. Your ship will land wherever the fuck you want it to. In this case it comes to a hovering halt at a hill that shouldn’t be called a hill and then descends vertically to settle on the dry land.

You’re climbing out before the engine’s properly whirred to a stop and have to kick the door so it lowers faster for you. You run straight to the house and fling open the door. The kitchen is desolate, besides a small paper on the table that simply says one word. _Gravvesite._

Turning on your heel, you abandon the domicile and head towards that fenced in plot of land. There’s an hole in the ground and your bloodpusher is in your throat as you run to it. Standing on the edge of the fresh grave, you look down into the shadows below.

In the dirt of the half dug pit sits Eridan. His back is to the wall. Across his lap is a dirty shovel, his hands curled around the handle. His chin is to his chest. His eyes closed. There’s more grey in his hair than black, and more grey than you saw the last time you were here, only three sweeps ago. That purple is almost faded out entirely, threaded with silver now.

“No,” you choke out the word. He couldn’t have died before you got here. He promised that he wouldn’t. He swore on his rings that he would wait for you. You want to fall down into the pit with him, be buried with him. You can’t do this alone.

Then his fins flutter and he looks up. He gives you a smile that you remember on another’s face. Old, tired, but so sweetly, innocently, happy. The pounding in your chest makes it hard to breathe. “You fuckhead,” you whisper, rubbing the back of your hand across your eyes. How dare he make you cry? You were too old for this shit.

He gets to his feet, his hands trembling slightly. “Hey Kar,” he says, “Just catchin’ my breath.” He tosses the shovel up onto the ground around the hole and climbs up the sloped side. He’s brushing dirt from his clothing when you rush around to him. You throw your arms around him and squeeze him tightly. Somehow, somewhere along the line, he started getting shorter than you. His chin pokes your shoulder and he sighs into your ear. “Glad you could make it, love.”

“Shut up,” you whisper, “God, you scared the living fuck out of me.”

Jerking your head back, you grab him by the shoulders and shake him, “What the hell were you fucking doing down there?”

In answer, he points to the left.

You look over and nearly swallow your tongue. There’s a gravestone waiting there. It’s blank except for two words. _Eridan Ampora._ “It was up to me to finish this grave.”

“No it fucking wasn’t!” You shout.

He cradles your face in one dirty hand and says, “Not anymore. You made it here in time. Now you can help me.”

You open your mouth to argue. Dispute that fact and declare that you will not be helping him dig his own grave but before you can even say one word, he’s leaned forward and bushed a kiss against your forehead and the fight drains out of you. “I’ll do it for you,” you find yourself saying instead, “You rest, please. I’ll dig it for you.”

“That would be a kindness to my shoulders,” he whispers. “Truth is I shoulda dug this sweeps ago when I still had the strength. I’ve been at it for a few days now.”

Your fingers tighten in his shirt and you close your eyes to fight back tears. “Idiot. Let’s get you something to eat.”

“There’s no time,” his lips are a ghost against your skin, “I need to go change. You need to finish what I started.” He gives you another kiss this time, except this one is light on your lips, and he steps back. You stand holding empty air as he makes his way towards the house.

You watch him go with fear clawing your stomach and an ache squeezing the air from your lungs. He moves so slowly, like every motion hurts him. You rub tears from your eyes again and snatch up the shovel. You have work to do.

Hopping down into the dirt, you rush to finish. Shovelful after shovelful of dirt flies into the air until you’ve dug out to his squared edges.

You’ve got sweat between your shoulder blades and dirt under your nails and on your uniform, but you feel accomplished. Climbing out of the hole, you look down, impressed with your quick work. Looking up, you expect to see Eridan heading out by now, or perhaps already waiting for you, but there’s no one.

You have to brutally slap away the fear that wells within  you as you drop the shovel and go running into the house. Muddy footprints lead to the back door but stop in the kitchen at a pair of abandoned shoes. You don’t even bother with that, even though you’re just as filthy, and you race towards the stairs and up them to the second floor.

The door hits the wall from the force of your shove and bounces back, but by the time it starts closing again you’re in the room. Eridan’s laying on the bed, dressed to the nines, complete with all his rings and his fucking cape. You stagger over to him. He was not going to do this to you twice in one fucking day. That was just the worst possible thing that he could do to you.

You touch his hand and its warmer than yours, but then you haven’t felt anything colder than your skin that wasn’t frozen or metallic. You squeeze his fingers and whisper, “Eridan, wake up. C’mon, we have to talk about some shit. I’ll make you tea and we can sit together like we did last time I was here… Eridan?”

You put one hand to his chest and the other to his mouth.

Slowly, you draw them back.

You bow your head.

With Feferi having been assassinated just ten sweeps ago, he had been the last one.

The very last one…

Besides you.

Sinking to your knees beside the bed, you hold his hand tightly, unafraid of hurting his frail fingers. You clutch his hand and you weep against his stupid satin bedspread.

CA: hurry

CG: JUST HOLD ON.  
CG: JUST HOLD ON UNTIL I GET THERE.  
CG: PLEASE, ERIDAN. YOU’RE THE LAST ONE AND I CAN’T LOSE YOU LIKE I LOST GAMZEE.  
CG: JUST WAIT IT OUT UNTIL I’M THERE. PLEASE. PROMISE ME.

CA: i promise

**Author's Note:**

> If you need some help clarifying the reason _why_ Karkat stays alive so long, check this out:: [Behind The Grave](http://ry-magnatar.tumblr.com/post/57488705457/behind-the-grave)
> 
> (ahaha what a clever title)


End file.
